


Kamikaze

by TalesOfErynGalen



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: All Vault 111 occupants survive, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beta Wanted, Double Agents, EXTREME Canon Divergence, Except Nate, I wish I could say its a fix it, I'm not joking - Freeform, Multi, Nate ily but please die already, Nick has Emotional Baggage, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Sole Survivor is a lawyer but also not, but we love him, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:47:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25739029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalesOfErynGalen/pseuds/TalesOfErynGalen
Summary: The Sole Survivor, Rose Callahan, is a pre-war double agent, and is absolutely not the only person to leave Vault 111 - in fact, her husband Nate was the sole casualty.
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/Male Sole Survivor, Female Sole Survivor/Nick Valentine
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a very rough outline at the moment, and I'm posting this first chapter more so other people can bully me into continuing to write. I'm extremely out of practice with fic writing - in fact, this is the first story I've written in over a year - and so criticism and tips are much appreciated. I did attempt to find a beta reader before I posted at all, but had no luck. If you're interested, please let me know!

_ Why is it so cold? _

Rose groaned, trying to pry her eyes open. Nate must’ve been hogging the blankets again. Despite having five of them piled on their bed, her husband usually managed to roll himself up in every single one of them during the night. He insisted on keeping the house ungodly cold, too, or it wouldn’t have been an issue.

“Honey, we talked about this,” she murmured. Something about the sound of her voice wasn’t quite right, but she shrugged it off as being roused from a particularly deep sleep. She couldn’t even remember what she’d dreamed about beyond a few vague impressions. There was no response from the other side of the bed. Rose huffed out an annoyed breath.

“Don’t think I won’t kick you to the couch, asshole.” Again, there was no response. Rose wrinkled her nose and tossed out an arm to try and find Nate - only to find a frigid metal wall instead. Her eyes snapped open immediately. “What the -”

Everything was dark. So dark that she couldn’t see her hand as she felt along the wall, encountering numerous pipes, bits of machinery,  _ glass? _ , and a firm, vinyl-covered seat underneath her. It was freezing, even colder than she’d thought when she woke up, and with each increasingly panicked breath a stab of pain went through her lungs. She raised her hand and slammed it against the wall in front of her, coughing horribly as she did.

“Let me  _ out! _ ” Her voice cracked as she yelled, grating as badly as if she’d been smoking a pack a day her entire life. The wall was unyielding, but hitting it had made a louder, more reverbrating sound than she’d expected. Definitely glass, from the sound of it. “Dammit, let me out!”

The more Rose woke up, the more she became aware that she was shivering, and so badly that she doubted she’d even be able to stand on her own. The fog that still clouded her mind wouldn’t go away, leading her in dazed circles as she tried to pinpoint why it felt so familiar. The answer came to her when she dropped heavily against her seat, suddenly overcome with fatigue. She’d been drugged.

_ Naturally. _

She tried to get her breathing under control as she sat there, completely limp. Tried to shake feeling back into her arms and legs. Where the hell was she? Where was Nate? Shaun? Who had them?

_ I guess they finally caught up to me _ . A dull sense of defeat made her huff and slouch further down in her seat. She’d known her idyllic second life wouldn’t be permanent, but she’d  _ hoped _ ...Nate and Shaun...finding out she was going to have a baby had given her  _ hope _ that maybe she’d get to just leave her past behind her.

Obviously not.

Outside her prison, a light flipped on. She sat up hurriedly, gripping onto the metal armrests that she could now see beside her seat. The wall in front of her was a window, edged with frost, and through it she could see a room that looked straight out of an old sci-fi show. Multiple large... _ pods,  _ or something, were lined up along the walls, along with an impressive array of machinery. Little frost-tinged windows showed their inhabitants, most of them slumped over but a few awake and looking around with fearful eyes. Something relaxed in Rose’s chest when she saw Nate in the pod right across from her, unharmed and slowly beginning to stir with Shaun in his arms. He caught sight of her after a moment, and shot her a lopsided grin.

And then she saw the people walking down from the door - several white hazmat suits with a man in a leather jacket walking at their head.

\--------

Rose woke the second time as if from a nightmare. She jolted forward out of her seat before her eyes were even open, screaming and snarling like a woman possessed. Her grief and panic were as strong as when she’d been drugged back to sleep, with the vision of Nate being shot still horribly vivid behind her eyelids. The soldier who’d shot him - he’d been  _ right there,  _ right in front of her while she was trapped, helpless. The wall had protected him, but as she jumped out of her pod Rose slammed into a warm body.  _ Aren’t any walls to protect you now, asshole. _

Her punch was clumsy and disjointed from how stiff her joints were after sitting down God-knows-how-long, but it hit. The pained yell of her victim didn’t exactly match up to the soldier’s gruff voice, but she was far past caring. All she could see, all she could hear - everything in her world was boiled down to seeing Nate’s head snap back, eyes staring directly at her but unseeing,  _ accusing _ , as one of the suits ripped Shaun from his arms and fairly ran away.

She was ripped off of the unfortunate soul almost immediately by a pair of hands on either of her arms. She screamed, feet scrabbling uselessly at the floor as she tried to rush back in. “He killed him! He killed him!”

“No, he didn’t!  _ Look,  _ Rose! Jeremy’s not the bastard that did this!”

Someone grabbed Rose’s jaw roughly, turning her head to the side. She sneered in their face, still struggling and holding their wrist in a vicelike grip, but as her mind cleared she recognized the person holding her. Sarah - Mrs. Able. The woman’s platinum blonde hair was piled neatly atop her head, as ever, her makeup all perfectly applied, but the serene, casually confident look she usually had about her was gone. For once, she actually looked her age - and frightened. Frightened and in pain.

Rose snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned, horrified to have hurt the girl. Sarah managed a small smile, however strained it looked. She looked over Rose’s shoulder, turning on a weak facsimile of the pleading look she’d perfected. “Let her go? Come on, I can barely even imagine how she must feel after all that.”

“How  _ she _ must feel!? She damn near broke Mr. Cofran’s...everything!” the hands holding her other arm tightened their grip where Sarah had released hers. Mr. Able had never been the reasonable sort.

“Give her a break, Dale,” Mr. Cofran spoke from...wherever he’d ended up after Rose’s assault. “‘M Not even mad. You saw when we...we opened Nate’s pod. She had to watch it happen. Should’ve...honestly should’ve expected her to do that.”

“Doesn’t change that she’d acting like a damn lunatic! Punching people!  _ Attacking _ them!” Mr. Able snorted derisively, but let go of Rose’s arm, albeit a bit roughly. “It’s enough to get a woman  _ committed _ .”

As her husband stalked away down the row of pods, Sarah carefully touched Rose’s shoulder. Her stormy eyes were, as always, so discerning that Rose had the sense they were looking directly into her soul. “Are you...alright?” There was a bit of hesitancy there, like she was afraid Rose would snap and attack her like she had Mr. Cofran.

“I-” Her voice still grated horribly. She paused, cleared her throat and took and a deep breath. “I will be. Is Mr. Cohran…?”

“Still in one piece, ma’am,” Jeremy Cohran said, and Rose’s attention snapped to him. He was sitting against an empty pod, grinning a little through the blood that coated half of his face. His smile lacked its usual life, though. “That was one hell of a right hook. Nate teach you that?”

“Nate...did it really...is he actually…”

“Not...not yet.” Sarah’s voice was so much quieter than Rose had ever heard it. Mr. Cofran’s smile dropped, replaced with poorly concealed pity. “He was shot in the head. He’s still alive but...but we don’t have a lot of hope that he’ll wake up. The Whitfields are looking after him for now, seeing if there’s anything they can do, but…”

Rose nodded numbly. Nate, dying, and Shaun was gone to...who knows where. The bombs had dropped, she remembered that much now. Was her baby out there in some kind of nuclear hell? If she left the vault, could she still find a hospital that was somehow still functioning, and would they have the capacity to treat Nate while they were dealing with the aftermath of the bombs?

“Where’s the staff of the vault? We need...we need to open the door. I need out.” Rose looked away from Sarah and Mr. Cofran for the first time since she woke up. The long, narrow chamber they were in had no signs of any people other than them. All the pods stood empty, and a thick layer of dust covered every available surface. None of the various Vault-Tec staff from before she’d gone into the pod were...anywhere. And it was still cold. So cold. An uneasy suspicion started to take hold in the back of her mind.

“We don’t know, we’re still trying to get into the Overseer’s terminal to get at their logbook and open what we’re guessing is the vault door, but there were...bodies.” Sarah grimaced. “Skeletons, really. In Vault-Tec gear.”

“Skeletons?” Rose slowly moved away from the pair, looking closely at each part of the room she came to. “That’s - decontamination wouldn’t take long enough for the ‘coats to rot away like that, even if they dropped dead the instant the pods closed. And all this dust, it’s -”

“It’s not right, I agree.” Sarah wiped a finger through the dust on top of a control panel. Dust motes flew into the air, and when she drew her hand away her entire finger was grey. “I heard something a while ago - just a silly little rumor from a man who came through a few months ago - but he said that a friend of a friend his had been committed to an asylum because he was adamant Vault-Tec were...experimenting. On humans. One of those experiments was allegedly...well…”

“Cryostasis,” Mr. Cofran supplied helpfully, getting to his feet with a grunt of effort. “That’s pretty much what we all agree happened to us, anyway. The pods, the cold, the fact that some of the terminals around here mention life support and freezing - you get the picture. We’ve all been popsicles and no one has the foggiest how long it’s been since we went under.”

As if she didn’t have enough life-changing events on her plate already. Rose rolled her shoulders, a grim determination setting in. “Luckily, that doesn’t change anything. You said there was a locked terminal, right? Show me. I can get in, and then we can get out of here.”

An hour later saw most of the survivors of Vault 111 ascending to the surface, with the elderly Whitfields having stayed behind to try and keep Nate breathing. Rose’s gut churned uncomfortably as she considered what they may find at the top of the elevator shaft. No matter what lay beyond the doors, whether it was an ongoing all-out nuclear war or a dead world, she would’ve felt safer with a gun on her belt. Mr. Able and Mr. Russel had the two 10 mm pistols from the vault, however, and didn’t look likely to hand them over any time soon. The closest thing to a weapon she’d managed to pick up was a dinner knife from the vault staff’s cafeteria, and it felt woefully insignificant in her hands. Sarah shifted uncomfortably next to her, eyes trained on the distant ceiling of the elevator shaft.

After what seemed like an eternity, the rusted metal of the final gate loomed into view ahead of them, screeching open just when Rose thought they would stay shut and crush them all into paste. Painfully bright sunlight seared into her eyes, jarring after the vault’s fluorescent lighting, and when she could finally see, she was the first to step off of the lift and into this new, post-war world they’d all woken up to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some changes to note in this chapter that I'll go back and edit in chapter one for consistency - character name changes. While I'm using the canon last names of Vault 111's other occupants, I've been taking some creative liberty with their names. Sarah Able is still Sarah, but Mr. Able and Mr. Cofran's names have been changed to Richard and Dale, respectively. The reason? I got too attached to Mr. Cofran to keep calling him Jeremy, and as I've developed these characters I couldn't help but name one of my least favorites Dick Able. I've also attempted to portray the impression I've gotten of how people were pre-war in the Fallout universe, which right now sums up to...stubbornness and misogyny. Don't worry, it's not here to stay, but I hope I wasn't too heavy handed with it.
> 
> Another thing about the other survivors - they are all the people you can find listed on the terminals in the vault. There are 11 of them, total, and while they will all at least play a part in this story, I've formed an attachment to some of them - I think you'll be able to tell who - and I'm nothing if not guilty of giving the best bits of plot to my favorite characters. You'll also notice I added a second dog in on a whim, inspired by the Classic Dogmeat retexture mod. Don't worry, he's there for a reason...hopefully. I hope you all love them (or hate them) as much as I'm starting to!
> 
> Also, please note that "slow burn" has been added to the tags. It just felt better than a rushed romance for Rose and Nick, considering that Nate is still *somewhat more alive* than I wanted him to be by now and we all know Nick has Emotional Baggage. Please die so we can start the healing process, Nate. I didn't mean for you to survive.

“Well...at least the dog’s cute.”

Sarah covered her mouth to hide her laugh from across the pile of rubble they were clearing. Rose smiled, despite the increasing tension she’d felt ever since waking up in her cryopod. As much as she didn’t want to have _time_ to smile and laugh, it was almost impossible to keep a straight face around the Cofrans’ daughter, Cindy.

The girl was only eleven years old, but was clearly handling the literal apocalypse _leagues_ better than any of the adults. Currently, she was bundled up in a too-large lab coat from the Vault, leaning up against a tree and fiddling with the Pip-Boy they’d found. One of the dogs that had been wandering around near the old Red Rocket was sitting against her leg, preening as she ran a hand listlessly through its fur. The mutt looked so unkempt that Rose had frankly been surprised it was tame at all - seeing it quickly attach itself to the youngest of the survivors and follow her around like a faithful puppy had been surreal.

Rose shook her head and got a firm grasp on the frame of what _had_ been the Whitfields’ car, waiting for Sarah to help her lift it. Two centuries and a decade hadn’t been kind to any part of Sanctuary Hills, from what they’d seen the past few days. The entire neighborhood, once the peak of the “American Dream,” was now practically unlivable, and that just wouldn’t do.

“I bought that house over there,” Mr. Cofran had noted once he saw the state of it. “Far as I’m concerned it’s still mine, bomb or not, and I’d be a piss-poor homeowner if I just left it there to lower property values.”

Come to think of it, all of the Cofrans had been astoundingly positive about the whole situation they’d found themselves in, continuing on as if nothing had changed. Rose still occasionally caught Dale looking so utterly lost that it made her uncomfortable, or heard Leah crying through the destroyed walls at night, but during the day they were practically the same as they’d been before the Vault. Dale whistled as he patched the walls of his old house and helped Codsworth carry the ruined furniture out. Leah had commandeered the responsibility of feeding the neighborhood, and always had a sweet smile on her face as she took the non-perishables she’d found in the houses and turned them into full meals. Cindy was just...a kid. She had the Pip-Boy whenever none of the adults needed it, and was usually playing some kind of game on it, or else running around the edges of Sanctuary with that dog on her heels.

The car frame came loose from the pile of debris it was in after a few sharp tugs. The two women carried it over to the collection of scrap they’d started near the Rosas’ garage, dropping it unceremoniously on top of the remains of a destroyed refrigerator.

“Thank, you ladies!” Mr. Cofran called from the workbench he’d managed to scrape together. He looked rough having gone several days without a proper bath or shower, but so did all the survivors. Dale at least put in the effort to look chipper despite how ragged he was. “I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do with this stuff, but it’s gotta come in handy eventually, right?” 

The Rosas’ old house was the most structurally sound of all the ruined buildings, so that was where they’d set up shop - literally and figuratively. Aside from the beds inside, the men were using the garage as a workshop where they spent most days repurposing scrap materials for use in repairing the neighborhood, with most of said scrap being moved, bit by bit, to the empty space just beside the garage. Rose and Sarah were responsible for most of the moving, brushing off the mens’ concerns with offhanded comments about how “most of this stuff isn’t half as heavy as you’d think, really.”

Behind the house, Leah Cofran had made the perplexing discovery of some kind of mutated watermelon growing where the Rosas’ old garden had been. She spent most of her free time trying to expand the remains of said garden with the seeds from the strange fruit. They didn’t eat the melons again after the first day, when they confirmed they were edible, but there was an undeniable fact and a sense of urgency hanging over all the survivors’ heads, like an anvil waiting to drop.

The preserved food from the different houses would only last them so long. They needed a more reliable source of food, quickly - and preferably of water, too. While it was keeping them alive and relatively clean well enough, the water from the river _burned_ their skin and throats like rubbing alcohol in an open cut.

Rose had a fair idea of where to start. Codsworth had mentioned people nearby, in Concord. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to buddy up to whatever type of people this wasteland had bred, but at the very least she might be able to get an idea of how to keep herself and her neighbors alive. That is, aside from keeping herself armed and on high alert - she’d lost track of how many mutated bugs she’d smashed to bits with the old tire iron hanging on her belt over the past week and a half.

The issue was that, even after nuclear war had all but ended the world, their group’s men were still determined to stick to their old, well-ingrained views. Some of them were more lenient about it - Dale was the shining example of them, and that was even considering the fact that he frowned a bit whenever he was reminded that his wife now carried a rusted old knife in case she needed to defend herself. The worst of them was undoubtedly the _impeccably_ “proper” Mr. Richard K. Able, and it was a pleasant day for everyone involved when the man had announced he’d be spending most of his time at the Red Rocket he’d run before the war. Rose could certainly do without his snide comments about her outburst and her tire iron, while she _knew_ that Sarah was much happier without her husband looming over her shoulder all day.

While it was nothing new - Rose had known they were like this even before the bombs dropped, after all - it still chafed at her. Particularly because, the instant she volunteered to go to Concord and meet with the people there, most of her neighbors were immediately up her ass about how _dangerous_ it was for her to go alone, or even to go at all. She would’ve gone anyway by now, if it weren’t for the fact that even she felt uncomfortable leaving Sanctuary Hills alone without knowing exactly what was out there.

“Honestly, they sound a bit violent,” Mrs. Whitfield had stated simply, when Rose tried to talk to her about it. “It may be best to let Dale, Richard, and Milo handle it - they’re the ones who’ve seen battle before, if it comes to that. Heaven forbid.”

_If only she knew._

Rose followed Sarah back to the debris pile they’d lifted the car frame from. Most of it was ruined garbage, little better than slag. Once Mr. Callahan finished his wheelbarrow, a lot of the trash strewn around the neighborhood would be moved beyond the houses. _Out of sight, out of mind_. For now, it stayed where it was and the two women sifted through it for more usable bits of junk.

A faint noise, entirely out of place, caught her attention. Her head snapped up, one hand already halfway to her tire iron, but it was just Cindy. The girl was engrossed in a game of Pip-Fall now, and her ratty dog had its head laid in her lap. Her dog.

An idea slowly took root in Rose’s mind.

She cast a sidelong glance to where most of their neighbors were congregated around the Rosas’ house. They were all completely focused on their various projects, from Mrs. Callhan’s clothes-mending on the front steps to the faint light from the far bedroom where the Whitfields took turns watching over Nate, still lost in a coma. That light, the reminder of what had happened to her happy little family, was what pushed Rose to finally speak. “Hey, Sarah?”

“What’s up?” Sarah asked, still lost in her examination of what appeared to have been a car door. Rose looked her up and down for a moment, gauging exactly what role Sarah would be of the most use in. Rose knew better than to try and keep her in the dark - she was too clever to not realize what was going on. However, she definitely wasn’t a fighter.

“...That other dog still making a nuisance of himself at the Rocket?”

“If you’re suddenly interested in having a pet, I’m sure Richard will be glad to get rid of him.” Before Rose could take a breath to reply, Sarah had gotten to her feet and held out one grungy hand to help her up. “C’mon, let’s take a walk down there and check if my dear husband hasn’t shot the poor thing yet.”

The walk to the old fuel station was thankfully short and uneventful. Even better, when they got there Mr. Able was making an awful racket trying to get the station’s automatic garage door working and there wasn’t a chance in Hell he’d notice his wife and the neighborhood’s “resident crazy” arriving. The dog had been lazing in the shade of a spindly bush, but perked his ears and sprang to his feet when the women came around the bend.

This dog was clearly in much better shape than Cindy’s mutt. Where the girl’s dog was shorter and broader with a shaggy, patched black-and-gray coat and mismatched eyes, its friend just looked like a normal, pure-bred German shepherd. The difference was stark enough to make Rose suspicious, but the dogs hadn’t made a single aggressive move and no angry owners had shown up to reclaim them, so she knelt down and held out a hand to it. The dog came to her almost immediately, his entire body swaying with the force of his tail wagging. After a moment, she ran her hand through his fur and over his neck. Definitely no tags. Even before the war a dog like this would’ve been rare to find without a proud owner attached to them - _or a handler,_ she thought as she eyed the faint scars she could see on the dog’s back.

Despite how tense she was thanks to her... _experience_ with this particular breed, she kept petting the dog as she looped a makeshift collar and leash of knotted rope around his neck. She stood and tugged lightly on the leash, testing. The dog didn’t budge an inch, although he did crane his neck around to sniff at his new collar.

She tugged harder and the dog remained completely still aside from cocking his head at her. Sarah laughed. “Yeah, no way you’re getting him to Concord like that.”

Rose wasn’t even surprised, honestly. “So, you figured it out?”

“What else _could_ you have been doing? I used to see you with that old army dog Nate took in after he was discharged. I could tell you didn’t particularly like the thing, even though you didn’t even _flinch_ when Mr. Russell’s dog got out and ran at you that one time.” Sarah’s words were spoken in the flat, matter-of-fact way that Rose had come to expect of her when she wasn’t around her husband. “You’ve got an issue with shepherds from _something_ , but if you wanted protection on the road then this dog’s better than Cindy’s, for sure.”

“Good observation,” Rose noted, “got any more? Because I don’t think this mutt wants to follow me.”

Clearly, however, the mutt _did_ want to follow them. After Sarah insisted on coming to Concord with Rose ( _“Two’s better than one, anyway,_ ” as Sarah said) and the pair had started off, the dog trotted after them. Sometimes he was glued to one of their sides, right up against their heels, and others he veered away from them, disappearing into the twisted foliage only to pop back out several yards ahead of or behind them. He was a curious thing, always sniffing and running off to check on things the women couldn’t hear or smell. As they walked, Rose got in the habit of watching the dog and taking her cues from what he did. As capable as she usually considered herself, she didn’t really have a very good feel for her tire iron just yet, and she had Sarah to worry about on top of that. She’d let her come along on a spur of the moment decision because the other woman was sharp and cunning enough to be a serious advantage, but if it came to a fight she knew that having a career housewife in the thick of things would be a disaster.

Just as they reach the fork in the road maybe a mile from the Rocket, marked by the severely _wrong_ corpse of some sort of cow, the dog’s ears flattened and he growled. Rose realized why a second later when the largest, most disturbing-looking bugs she’d seen yet came into view over the cow’s bloated corpse. Mosquitoes - at least, her first instinct was to call them that. But they were huge, and their needle-like mouths were more than long enough to skewer a person. Her tire iron suddenly felt even more woefully insignificant than before. _Like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Or maybe a toothpick to a swordfight._

She shook her head and steeled herself. _Find people. Help Shaun and Nate._ Knife, toothpick - she’d made do with worse. She threw out an arm to stop Sarah and firmly pushed her back as she drew her iron. “Go a bit back down the road and wait. I can handle this.”

“Are you _insane_ ?! No!” Sarah shoved back with a vengeance, although she froze and cast an uneasy glance at the insects afterwards to make sure they hadn’t noticed the movement. She glared at Rose with surprising ferocity and gestured angrily at the bugs. “They’ll _kill you_! Let’s just go back and get one of the guys!”

“We don’t _need_ the guys to handle this for us!” Rose seethed. “How am I supposed to do _anything_ about finding Shaun if I get scared and run home barely an hour’s walk from Sanctuary? No one else is doing anything about it, that’s for damn sure!”

Before Sarah could come up with an answer to that, Rose shoved her back again, much rougher than before, and drew her tire iron as she stormed towards the bugs. The disgusting things were so focused on their meal that they didn’t realize she was there until she’d swatted one of them to the ground. The _thunk_ of the tire iron crushing its carapace was altogether too meaty considering it was a _bug, for crying out loud_. It twitched feebly on the ground, trying to rise until Rose slammed one shoe through what she estimated was its head, already taking a swing at the next bug to fly at her.

The second one dodged her attack with alarming speed and _jabbed_ at her with its mouth. She barely twisted out of the way, but instead crashed into the rotting carcass they’d been feeding from. The smell was awful - one of the worst things she’d ever experienced, and that was saying something. The feeling of the rotting meat under her hands and the warm wetness on her Vault suit was just as bad. She sprang up again without allowing herself to dwell on it and took another crack at the nearest bug while the dog bit at the other. She honestly couldn’t tell whether it was the same one or the third she’d counted as she approached, but her hit made it veer several feet away from her.

Both of the bugs rushed at her again, and she wound up for another swing - it’d have to be a damn good one to get both of them at once. Just as she swung the tire iron with a yell - _not strong enough to hit them both, shit,_ ** _shit_** \- rapid gunfire split the air. The first bug her tire iron hit crumpled to the ground, while the other _exploded_ in a rain of goo and too-dark blood. The viscera splattered across her, covering what little of her suit wasn’t already disgusting, and _God_ it smelled even worse than the cow.

 _Who the hell -_ “Dale?!”

Mr. Cofran stood a little ways up the road, sweat-drenched and out of breath with his gun still half-raised. If she hadn’t been wearing more rotting bodily fluids than fabric, Rose might’ve laughed at the picture he cut. She knew he’d been in the army, along with Nate and a couple of their other neighbors, but the Dale of today had a little more than a bit of a paunch, a receding hairline, and an overall very thoroughly suburban-dad look about him. Seeing him with a gun was just...out of place.

“Rose Callaghan - I swear to God -” he stopped to pant for a moment, before angrily throwing his arms out to the side and emphatically yelling, “What the _fuck_?!”

The way his voice cracked as he yelled finally made Rose snort. She turned her head to the side to try and hide her laugh. No luck.

“What the actual _fuck,_ Rose? Why are you... _laughing_ ? You just...you just ran off! No word to anyone or anything! If I hadn’t... _damn it,_ Rose, this isn’t a joke - if I hadn’t caught up to you, that thing would’ve killed -” He put a hand to his head, his shoulders sagging abruptly. “Aside from the fact that I consider you a friend...if Nate wakes up, I don’t want to have to tell him that you went and got yourself killed. And if he doesn’t...Shaun needs at least one parent.”

All of Rose’s levity left her in an instant at the reminder of her family’s precarious situation. A spark of indignant anger came to life in her chest. “I know that, Dale. Why the hell do you think I’m _out here_ ?!” She threw her tire iron back into its makeshift sling on her belt and stalked towards her husband’s friend. “Nate needs a real fucking hospital, and we _need_ to be looking for Shaun! God knows if there’s even some kind of police out here to ask for help, but we should be _looking_ ! We should’ve been looking from the moment we left the Vault! Priority number one, _find the goddamn kidnapped child_ . But no! Everyone wants to sit around and _play house_ !” She stopped when she was nearly nose-to-nose with Mr. Cofran. “I waited for someone to go to Concord. I tried to be polite and play by your rules. But you all kept trying to carry on like the world never _ended_ , and I’m tired of doing nothing. As you can see,” she gestured to the broken forms of the too-large mosquitoes on the road, “I’m at least halfway capable of defending myself. You two can go back to playing pretend if that’s what you’d rather do, but I won’t. I’m going to Concord.”

She spun around and marched down the road, past the rotted cow - good God, the thing had two heads - and on towards the buildings she could see through the trees now. The dog appeared at her side almost instantly, running close to her legs like he was on a leash, and a moment later she heard footsteps just before Dale appeared on one side of her, and Sarah on the other. Neither of them said a word, though Sarah looked visibly shaken and Dale kept his gun in his hand as they walked.

\---------------

The streets of Concord were eerily deserted, aside from an inordinate amount of birds. The once-pristine buildings looked like they hadn’t seen any care or occupation for - well, for hundreds of years. The streets were cracked and buckled almost beyond recognition, and the fact that they were littered with _actual barricades_ didn’t exactly instill Rose with hope for the state of the world. Astoundingly, some banners advertising the Museum of Freedom still hung between the buildings. _Must be some damn good rope._

The barricades became more common until they were standing right at the doors of the museum, where they were thickest and, worrying, the most riddled with bullet holes and burns from laser weapons. There were a few slumped forms scattered around them that looked eerily human. She did her best to ignore them and keep an eye out for _whatever killed them_.

Muffled yelling was coming from inside the museum. Rose couldn’t make out a word of it until someone came sprinting into view on the roof, followed by four others.The last of them to appear - _what the hell is he wearing_ \- noticed the three standing down on the street. Rose heard an indistinct, “Oh, thank God,” before he was yelling.

“Hey, you! We could really use some help up here! The Raiders have us cornered and we’ve held out just about as long as we can, but they’ve got reinforcements arriving any minute now!” One of the people with the man must have said something, from the way he looked back over his shoulder for a quick second. “There’s an old suit of power armor up here. If you could find a way into the generator room and get that fusion core up here, we may just stand a chance! Please, _hurry_!”

“Christ,” Dale muttered, already taking a step back. When Rose looked at him, he was ashen faced and staunchly avoiding looking at the five people hole up on the roof. He pointedly turned to go when the sound of a laser weapon being fired sounded above them.

Rose could’ve beat the man with her tire iron. “Are you kidding me right now? _Seriously_ ? You want to leave the first people we’ve seen in this place to _die_?”

The resignation on Dale’s face, and the fact that he wouldn’t even look at _her_ , were answer enough. “Nothing we can do. We almost lost a fight to a bunch of glorified mosquitoes. What are we supposed to do against people?”

“The bugs were _new,_ ” Rose insisted, gripping Dale’s arm with alarming strength to keep him in place. “People aren’t. You were a soldier, yeah? This should be old hat for you. They need _help._ ”

“And I’m the only one here who’s killed-”

Rose used her grip on Dale’s arm to yank him uncomfortably close to her. “You wish. I know what I’m doing, Mr. Cofran.” she released him and he yanked his arm back, rubbing uncomfortably at where she’d grabbed him. “Sarah, you need to find cover. Hide until one of us comes to get you, alright? Take the dog.”

Sarah and the dog hurried off into one of the ruined shop fronts as Rose bounded up the stairs to the museum. Behind her, Dale cussed vehemently under his breath before following her. When she shouldered the door open, tire iron already held back for a swing, the two of them and the dog descended into chaos.

Laser fire and bullets alike instantly started bouncing off the walls around them, a handful of the “raiders” inside having anticipated them entering. Dale, for all his previous reluctance, fell into the swing of things quickly. He ducked behind a fallen display case for cover, frequently popping his head up to return the raiders’ fire. Rose resigned herself to having to beat some people to death with her tire iron - until one of them dropped from the walkway above her, his gun skittering out of his limp hands. A shotgun. A really, really shitty shotgun, but she could see extra cases of ammo in his coat pockets and she’d take whatever she could get.

“Keep ‘em busy for me!” she yelled back at Dale as she ran for the stairs. Her only answer was a wordless, vaguely panicked yell.

Despite how long it had been since she’d held a gun, it felt far too natural in her hands as she repeatedly loaded, shot, and reloaded. The raiders fell far more often than she shot - she couldn’t tell whether it was her or Dale who killed most of them, but as long as they were down, she didn’t care. The museum’s soundtrack made the whole thing feel more cartoonish than she had been expecting - and damn, she hadn’t expected those speakers to hold up for ten years, let alone two hundred and ten - and it felt even more surreal to be gunning people down in a place she’d visited with her family what felt like only a month ago.

“I can’t get a clear shot on any more of them! I’m going for the core!” Dale shouted from the first floor. Rose reloaded her shotgun and fired at a raider who’d poked his head over the third story balcony. The shot flew wide and missed him so completely he didn’t even have to flinch back to miss it.

“I’m heading further up! This damn gun isn’t any use until I’m right up in their faces!”

Rose darted through one of the few doors that wasn’t boarded up. Two more raiders - distracted by an argument on whether they should run, ironically - fell before they’d even fully realized she was there. Again, despite the years between her last time fighting and now (and that was just the years she’d been _awake_ for), it felt uncomfortably familiar to be stalking and killing people in the dimly lit halls. She didn’t even want to consider the feeling in her chest that was worryingly close to pride. _You left this behind. You left this behind for Nate. Shaun. Don’t forget_.

She was covering behind a doorway when Dale finally got the fusion core free from the generator - the lights flickered out in an instant and the audio track ground to a staticky halt. In the brief moment of confusion she could hear among the remaining raiders, she leaned out and fired off as many shots as she could before she needed to reload. At least two bodies hit the floor, judging by the heavy thuds that reverberated through the planks. She continued her routine - blindly firing, reloading, and repeating - until Dale skidded to a halt beside her, crouched while she was standing. He leaned his whole torso around the door and fired off shot after shot before slowly drawing back in.

“I think that may have been all of them,” he muttered. “Can’t see any more, at least.”

“See? Not as hopeless as you thought, huh?” Rose couldn’t help but smirk down at him, a bit vindictively. He scowled back tiredly, but it was lacking heat. “Now let's get that core up to our new friends.”

The pair of them walked the last several feet to the roof access door, which had been barricaded ridiculously heavily on the other side, from how it didn’t even budge when Dale rammed his shoulder into it. Rose sighed and knocked twice. When there was no answer, she knocked louder. “Oh, don’t tell me they’re-”

The door was yanked open without warning, and the strangely dressed man who’d yelled at them from the roof was there, grinning ear to ear. “Damn. I don’t know who y’all are, but you have _perfect_ timing. I thought we were dead for sure! Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minutemen.”

“Minute-?” Rose cut herself off with a quiet sigh. _Why am I even questioning anything anymore?_ “I’m Rose, and that’s Dale.

Garvey shook her hand energetically when she’d actually been raising it to brush a stray bit of hair from her face, and then held his hand out to Dale expectantly. Instead of shaking his hand, Dale took the fusion core out of the small pouch he’d stowed it in and slapped it into his palm. Garvey just stared at it for a moment, and then, if it was even possible, his smile grew wider.

“You got it! You sure you aren’t some kind of guardian angels?” His grin faltered for a second as he took in Dale’s disheveled appearance and the gratuitous amount of gore splattered across Rose. “Nevermind. Well, come on. Those raiders managed to call for the rest of their group before you two took them out, and I need to get in that suit before they get here so I have time to figure out the controls.”

“Figure out the-?” Rose was fairly certain she’d never heard Dale sound so _offended_ before in her life - and that was considering the fact he’d been yelling at her for running off barely an hour before. He jogged up the stairs after Garvey with an impressive amount of gusto for how tired he looked. “Hey. _Hey!_ Have you ever actually been in a suit of power armor? Kid! I’m talking to you!”

By the time Rose started up the stairs, the two were too far ahead for her to hear Garvey’s response, but the look on Dale’s face when she reached them was enough. His mouth was gaped open like a fish’s, and his eyes damn near bugged out of his head and he looked between Garvey, standing in front of his little group, and the suit of T-45 power armor across from them...which would be lucky to be called anything close to serviceable. Rose had to hand it to Garvey, at least - he wasn’t wavering the slightest in the face of Dale’s clear doubt, or the fact that he was planning on climbing into a suit of power armor with no training or experience.

“You can’t just…” Dale sounded like he was genuinely struggling to speak. “Kid, you’ll die. You can’t go from suiting up for the first time to charging straight into battle in a few minutes. It’s suicide.”

“I don’t really see what other options we have,” Garvey replied. “We’ve been holed up here for weeks, and we’re damn near out of food and ammo. None of us are going to make it out of here alive unless we bring the fight to the raiders. Not the other way around.”

“Just…” Dale let out a hissing breath, and looked at Rose with a very clear _“This is your fault”_ in his eyes. “Give the fusion core here, kid. I’ve got the training for it - I’ll suit up.”

A short time later and Rose had picked a good vantage point at one of the museum’s windows, where she could easily see all of Concord’s former main street. She couldn’t see wherever Sarah had chosen to hide, and she hoped the raiders wouldn’t either. This was turning into a much riskier situation than she’d assumed at first, according to Garvey.

Speaking of, Preston had taken up his post at the window next to her, a laser _musket_ of all things already aimed over the windowsill, and the two with him who could fight, Sturges and Marcy, were up on the roof with Dale. The trio’s shadows were thrown in sharp relief against a neighboring building as the sun set, from Marcy and Sturges shifting their grips on their guns to Dale trying to work as much rust out of the suit as possible.

Dale’s voice floated down to her from where he paced on the roof, indignant and rough thanks to the speakers in his helmet. “This is gonna do about as much good as wearing a busted can of biscuits.”

“Oh, stop complaining, already!” Marcy snapped back. “You’ve already said it’s a piece of shit about a _thousand_ times.”

Rose snorted and trained her gaze back onto the road. According to Preston, the raiders always came from the front of the museum - no exceptions. It was a lazy, predictable strategy, but she supposed she wouldn’t do much different if she were a group of violent whackjobs going to attack a small group that mostly consisted of civilians. As far as she could tell, anyway. There was something about Preston that reminded her vaguely of Nate and his old army buddies, even if the guy must’ve been a solid decade younger than any of them.

They didn’t have to wait long for the raiders to make their appearance - at least twenty of them slowly straggled into town, spread out but with their weapons lowered. Cocky. Rose stared down the sights of the equally shitty sniper rifle she’d found among the dead raiders - made of _pipe_ of all things - and waited until the first raider stepped onto the stretch of road leading to the museum before she put a bullet in his head.

“Damn, good shot,” Preston muttered next to her, shooting her a smile with only a little nervous energy.

Rose shot a grin back before yelling down to the raiders, “See, the smart thing to do here would be to turn around and leave, fellas!”

A lot of shouts came from a lot of the raiders all at once. The general consensus, it seemed, was that the “sniper bitch” could fuck right off. She ducked back under the windowsill as bullets ricocheted off the wood. She thought she could faintly hear someone say, “Damn it, Rose - let’s get this over with,” before Dale dropped off the roof. The massive, dark shape of his power armor, ravaged by time as it was, flashed by her window and landed with a thunderous _boom_ on the street below. Multiple raiders cussed and stumbled away, with some racing inside the destroyed shop fronts for cover. _Shit, don’t find Sarah._

Without preamble, Dale spun up the minigun Sturges had helpfully pointed out was still loaded and mounted on the museum’s vertibird display. The roar of the gun filled Rose’s ears as she swapped to the 10 mm Dale had left behind and started firing shots at the raiders in their confusion. There was already an alarming amount of red on the cracked pavement, and there was only more as more raiders fell to the combined assault of Dale and the four shooters still in the museum.

After what felt like no time at all, there weren’t any raiders left that she could see. She took a chance and lowered her gun as Dale moved slowly down the street, checking each shop front.

“ _That_ was awesome,” Preston said after a minute. Rose looked at him and cocked a brow. There was quite a bit of relief in his eyes, and more than a little awe, too. And he was tired - now that the worst was over and done with and he’d started to relax, she could see the exhaustion in every line of his body and the deep bags under his eyes.

“How long has it been since you slept?” The words were out of her mouth before she even realized she’d said them. Memories flashed through her mind - asking Nate the same thing after she’d had to leave for a few days and came back to find him sitting on the couch at 2 a.m., a faraway look in his eyes. Nate asking _her_ for a change a couple of days after she’d found out she was pregnant and her fears had kept her awake. She shook off those old ghosts - even if they didn’t _feel_ so old. “Sorry. Forget it.”

“No, it’s alright. Honestly, it’s...it’s been a couple days.” He smiled at her as he sagged to sit against the windowsill. “I’m looking forward to getting to rest a bit more, soon. We’re headed for a place up north we heard was safe.”

“Well, I don’t know how long we can stay with you all, but Dale and I could walk with you at least part of the way. Make sure you get there relatively safely. We live a few miles up the road.”

“Really? You’ve already helped so much, are you sure that-?”

“What the fuck was that?” Rose cut Preston off sharply, crouched back at the window with her 10 mm raised again in an instant. Preston fumbled for the sniper rifle Rose had dropped on the floor and peered down the sights. After a moment, he went completely stock still.

“That’s bad.”

Hardly a portion of a second later, a... _thing_ burst out from a pile of debris across the street that sent Rose’s heart racing just _looking_ at it. It was one of the most hideous creatures she’d ever seen, and unlike the _other_ mutated animals they’d encountered, she couldn’t tell what the hell this thing had been born from. Just looking at it, all she got was an immediate impression of claws, horns, and teeth, shortly followed by the biggest _oh shit_ moment of her life.

Aside from Dale in his power armor, who’d already started moving slowly backwards...Rose could see Sarah, out in the open and completely frozen. The near-neon blue of her vault suit only served to make her more noticeable, and when she stumbled backwards, the _thing’s_ head snapped around to her. It _roared_ , and Sarah took off into the nearest building at a dead sprint. The creature crashed against the doorframe behind her, and the old stonework _crumbled._

“ _Shit_! Garvey, what the hell is that thing? What do we do?!” Rose lined up her shot as best she could without a scope and fired every bullet left in the 10 mm. If it hit the beast, it did absolutely nothing that she could notice.

“Deathclaw,” Preston answered, and Rose _did not_ like the waver in his voice. “And usually? We just throw everything we’ve got at it, and hope like hell it’s enough.”

“Throw-” Rose’s growing panic was cut short as she remembered what she’d seen a few of the raiders tossing around. _That...could work_. “Keep shooting the damn thing so Dale isn’t on his own. I’ve got an idea.”

Preston nodded tightly, switching back to his laser musket when it was clear the rifle’s bullets weren’t doing much of anything. Rose ran back out into the parts of the museum she and Dale had cleared out, scanning quickly over each of the bodies. _Come on, come on...there! And over there!_

She scooped up every molotov cocktail she could find on the bodies. It was crude, and she would’ve preferred to find actual grenades, but she could make it work. After she’d collected every bottle she could find, for a grand total of seventeen - excessive, in her opinion - she raced back up the stairs. A few of the cocktails were left with Preston, while she took the rest up to Marcy and Sturges on the roof.

“Hope you’ve got a good arm,” She said by way of explanation as she set her load down near the edge of the roof. “Hopefully this works. _Hey, Dale!_ ”

She couldn’t tell if he’d heard her. In fact, he probably didn’t. The deathclaw’s full attention was on him now, and it was just barely held at bay by the constant spray of bullets from his minigun. The thing was absolutely massive - even larger than Dale’s suit. The shock from seeing the sheer size of the beast left Rose frozen on the roof longer than she liked, especially when it raised one wicked hand and swatted Dale.

And Dale, even in full power armor, went flying.

“Shit!” Before she could think about what she was doing, Rose stuffed as many cocktails under her makeshift belt as she safely could. One of the old pre-war banners was attached to the roof near her. _Please be as sturdy as I think…_

She gripped the rope it was strung up by and let herself drop over the ledge. The whole thing swayed wildly under her weight, and creaked in a way that had her heart in her throat, but held. Thank God, it held. She swung her way down the length of it as quickly as she dared - by the time she hauled herself onto the roof of the neighboring shop, she was certain that the deathclaw’s roars, coupled with Sarah’s screams and the alarms going off in Dale’s suit, would haunt her nightmares for years.

Rose ran down the roof she’d reached as far as she could, until she was right above the deathclaw as it inspected the shop Sarah had holed herself up in. Rose decidedly didn’t like the too-intelligent way it was sniffing around the busted windows. She yanked one of the cocktails from her belt and hurled it straight at the beast, as hard as she could manage. It roared in pain, jerking away from the windows, and Rose felt a savage sense of satisfaction. _You may be one tough son of a bitch, but you sure aren’t fireproof._

Dale was flat on his back a little ways down the street. His busted biscuit can of a suit of power armor looked even more torn up now. Massive gouges marked the metal from the hits he’d taken, and one leg had been stripped down to the frame at some point. He didn’t look good - but the worst of Rose’s fears were taken away when he painstakingly rose on one elbow and spun up his minigun for another attack.

The nightmarish fight was over with soon after that. The deathclaw slumped dead in the street, and Sarah raced out of her hiding spot to hover uncomfortably near Dale as he struggled to his feet. Rose, sans every molotov cocktail she’d found, carefully scaled down the front of the building to join them. Dale pried off his helmet once he was standing, and _damn_ he didn’t look good. Blood and sweat were both smeared liberally across his face, and a gash had been opened that stretched from just above his eye to behind his receding hairline.

“Helmet buckled when the damn thing threw me,” he explained when Rose’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of him. “I think it’s the only place I’m hurt, though, aside from some bruising.”

“What...was that thing?” Sarah asked. Her voice was shaking almost as badly as the rest of her. “What just _happened_?”

“According to Preston, that thing’s called a deathclaw. It...wasn’t supposed to be here, I think.” Rose shook her head. “But it’s dead, and that’s the only thing that matters right now.”

By then, the group from the museum had joined them. Marcy kicked the deathclaw as she passed it, for good measure. “Damn right,” she muttered.

Preston was back to smiling again, but now that she’d noticed, it was impossible for Rose to miss how tired the man was. He was barely even keeping a grip on his musket. “I just wanted to thank you all again. Even with just the raiders, we didn’t have much of a chance, but with a deathclaw in the mix…” he shook his head in disbelief. “We’d probably already be dead. I don’t know how we could possibly repay you.”

“How about this?” Rose asked, butting in before Dale could take control of the conversation. This was what they’d come to Concord for, after all, and she wasn’t taking any chances on losing her window of opportunity. “We’ll walk with you as far as we can to wherever it is you’re heading, and you can answer some questions we’ve got. I get the feeling that we’re more than a little under informed.”

Dale sighed, obviously irritated, but didn’t try to challenge her. “Where are you all headed, then?”

“Place called Sanctuary,” Sturges answered. “Old pre-war neighborhood. If everyone’s in agreement, we’re plannin’ to set up a little community there.”

“Well, that’s a coincidence and a half,” Dale muttered. “I guess we’re sticking together longer than we thought. We live in Sanctuary.”

 _Yeah_ , Rose thought as she looked over the small group that were apparently planning to be her new neighbors. They definitely didn’t look like they had the same reservations about leaving their comfort zone as the other survivors did. _Going to Concord was definitely worth it_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there's chapter two done and dusted! Please let me know what you think! If you couldn't tell by how much longer it is than chapter one, it was much easier to write. I'm also trying to portray some of these characters, such as Rose and Dale, as people who know what they're doing from previous experience, but who are still pretty unprepared because the wasteland is extremely different from anything they've ever seen before. Please leave any criticism or tips in the comments!

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully that wasn't too awful. Writing it certainly felt like pulling teeth. Once again, please leave any thoughts about the fic - good, bad, or anything else - in the comments, and let me know if anyone would be interested in beta'ing for the story!


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